He's been running current builds but is finding it crashes a lot and really slow.

My first question is, is there's anything looking at these specs that looks immediately suspect that he should be switching out to make Smoke run way better? More RAM is always a plus, and I'm sure an SSD would help his system feel snappier in general, but is his graphics card crap for Smoke?

Second question is, based on what we know now, is he ultimately going to get better performance out of this MacPro, or one of the soon to be released toped out 27" iMacs?

Thanks for any advice. I'm not a smoke user myself, so I'm unsure about what's most important in a good system.

Based on what we know it is very difficult to tell what performances you will get out of each machine in a performance shoot out. I cannot give you any concrete benchmarks but seeing 2K playback on a laptop with thunderbolt is quite something to see.